Monthly Archives: October 2017

I don’t know anything about the creators of this chart, but the numbers look right. This kind of consolidation is actually happening in every large industry. It is unprecedented in world history. Corporate power has become so great it has taken over most governments of the world. Liberals think voting is going to slow this juggernaut and it seems most lefties feel they don’t have to work toward a mass movement or have a long term plan. In the meantime, while the Republican party may be in disarray, the right runs most of the world, and is gaining power everyday. In the u.s., people continue to be disappointed in the Dems because they refuse to believe the Dems represent corporate interests and do not care about what happens to actual people. Well, the evidence has been everywhere for decades. The political spectrum has been violently pulled so far to the right that most liberals are on the right and don’t even know it. Breaking that down would take a library of books, but one key is that their comfort insulates them from the consequences of, say, voting for neoliberals. Or they think they are insulated. One would assume any number of catastrophic events would have clued people in, but stolen elections, wars, economic disasters, repression and oppression wasn’t enough. Now the same forces responsible for all of those horrors and more (let’s call them capitalists for short) have another face in the white house. That seems to have shaken the liberals up a bit. Their answer? The Resistance. Well, if liberals want the changes they say they believe in they will have to become radicals. And then someone will have to remind radicals that they will have to be as organized as capital in order for any radical vision to have a chance. And about that vision thing…

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(This is a guest post by Olivier Jutel, lecturer of journalism at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji. You can find him on Twitter at @OJutel.)

For those looking for an escape from Trump’s America, New Zealand appears to be a choice destination to ride out the catastrophe, with historic achievements like the first welfare state, a robust anti-nuclear movement successfully staring down the United States, and the Waitangi tribunal that monitors the government’s progress on keeping its obligations to the Maori.

Yet, fantasies born out of one’s own political desperation do not tend to hold up well under scrutiny.

It is telling that misanthropist billionaire vampire and Trump supporter Peter Thiel became a citizen of New Zealand, indulging in equal parts his Lord Of The Rings fantasies and bunker style apocalypticism. The role New Zealand plays in the dreams of the rich was recently captured…

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This is the logic of capitalism. Ceaseless accumulation and the commodification of all things. It has killed and enslaved hundreds of millions. There are now essentially zero constraints on capital, i.e., no regulations on corporations – because they have purchased most of the world’s politicians and written the laws that are supposed to regulate them. In the history of the world, wealth and power has never been more consolidated.

At Bloomberg Businesweek, Caroline Winter visits Nestlé’s bottling plant in Mecosta County, Michigan to analyze how the multinational corporations targets small communities with promises of jobs, and buys up public land to gain control of water resources. Nestle sold $7.7 billion dollars worth of bottled water last year, making it the world’s largest bottled water company. It made that money partly by paying a pittance for its product. Nestlé pays the U.S. Forest Service only $524 a year to draw 30 million gallons of public water in San Bernardino, California, and Nestlé pays the city of Evart, Michigan just $250,000 a year for its water. Consumers drink bottled water because they assume it’s safer than tap, but that makes us complicit in what many analysts and activists warn is the gradual privatization of water. These multinational corporations don’t have the public’s best interests in mind, activists warn. If…